My hand felt for the Luger as I awoke to the sound of somebody entering the apartment. The cold metal was comforting. I clicked off the safety catch while it was still muffled by the pillow. The clock read 11.35.
Footsteps approached the bedroom door.
‘Thomas?’ It was Pedro’s voice.
‘Come in.’
He entered, clearly disconcerted by the gun pointed at him. There was nobody behind him and I lowered the Luger.
‘Sorry to wake you up at this unearthly hour,’ Pedro said sarcastically. ‘I would have got here earlier but I had to shake off a tail.’
‘I’ve had a hectic night.’
‘I know. I’ll make some coffee while you get dressed. There’s a lot to talk about.’
The coffee was black and invigorating.
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘Nowhere else you could have gone. I heard about the bomb at the hotel and that you’d disappeared. You had to be here.’
‘You mean it’s in the morning papers?’
‘No, I heard it on the grapevine. The regime will have to let the press publish the story because Stover was American and the US press will be buzzing around soon. They’re probably at the hotel now. It will be put down to terrorists of course. The CIA will be wetting themselves in case it comes out that Stover was one of them. Hopefully you won’t be involved at all. What exactly happened?’
I recounted the whole story. Finding the leaflets, which Pedro confirmed were out of date. The conversation with Gary. The explosion. My own narrowest of escapes. Gomes. Conniston contacting Nebulo.
Finally we played the tape I had retrieved from the villa. I offered no explanations: that’s what I wanted from Pedro but he said nothing.
‘I’m starting to suspect everything,’ I concluded. ‘This morning a Corcel, like mine but red, followed me towards Duque de Caxias. I thought I was being tailed but he turned off.’
‘You seem a bit edgy,’ Pedro agreed. ‘People don’t often point guns at me.’
‘Well I have every right to be edgy. Somebody’s just tried to kill me. But why?’
In my mind the only possible reason to kill me was that I had identified the auctioneers and they were worried about what I would do next. But how did they know I was on to them? Unless anyone from inside the Villa Nhambiquaras had seen me prowling around, which I was convinced could not have happened, somebody must have told them. And that meant Pedro or someone he had spoken to in London. That was not a chain of thought I wanted to explore with Pedro.
‘Violence is the last resort of the incompetent,’ I continued. ‘The DG keeps saying that. It’s from one of Isaac Asimov’s books. I could see why Martines didn’t want me around but the bomb was crude. London could have a replacement here in hours. The last resort of the incompetent. The Martines you described wasn’t incompetent. I thought we were dealing with a veteran international arms dealer not someone who starts flailing out at the first sign of trouble. We saw Martines as the spider at the centre of the web, to mix metaphors he was the man pulling all the strings. But the Martines we heard on the phone taps was quite different. What’s changed? Why is he so rattled he would risk killing me?’
‘Perhaps it’s just old age,’ Pedro responded. ‘It happens. You remember that photo of Martines in a wheelchair. Perhaps his mind has gone and Budermann has taken over. Or Nebulo. My conclusion from that tape is that you were on to Budermann and so Nebulo decided you had to go. Nebulo decided. Not Martines.’
Pedro then jumped to the question that had been troubling me earlier. ‘What we need to work out is how they seem to have discovered that you had found out about Budermann. Did he spot you following him?’
‘You tell me.’
I thought about the exact words Nebulo had used on the first phone call we heard. He was worried that the man he called Hans would lead me to Martines. So at that stage they hadn’t known I had found the Villa Nhambiquaras. Budermann must have seen me following him but thought he had lost me. That prompted another question.
‘Why couldn’t Martines describe my car when Nebulo asked?’
‘Perhaps Budermann just hadn’t told him and he didn’t think of asking.’
That sounded plausible but what about the men outside? Budermann had now chased them away but how did he find out they were there?
‘Accident probably,’ said Pedro. ‘A neighbour drives past and sees the Volkswagens there each day. He gets suspicious and phones Martines, or phones the police and Captain Gomes tells Martines. I’m surprised anyone managed to observe the villa for any length of time without being spotted. I checked with the car hire firm. That Mercedes was hired five weeks ago. Someone called David Allenberg. He used a US passport for identification and gave an address in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.’
‘No local address?’
‘Eighty-six Avenida Pasteur, which is a dead end. It’s the South African Legation and they deny all knowledge of him.’
‘You believe them? Adam Joseff thought the South Africans might be involved.’
‘That’s unlikely. Word would have got around if they had got anybody in our line here. And Allenberg doesn’t have a South African passport. He probably looked for a confusing address and picked that. It’s the sort of thing I’d have done. I’ve asked London to check the US address. Now we’ve got a name to go with the photos I’ll put out a few feelers.’
‘At least if he’s been here five weeks he can’t have anything to do with the Griffin Interrogator. Nobody had even heard of it five weeks ago.’
‘There’s another way Martines could have discovered you were on to him,’ Pedro added slowly, following a chain of thought I had already explored. ‘Through me. I’ve been asking around, discreetly, but word may have got back. Through Persio perhaps. I don’t know him at all. He could have given me the plan of the villa and then phoned Martines.’
I half believed him. I was coming to believe that it was only through Pedro that the auctioneers could have got on to me. But he hadn’t passed that information on through Persio. For one thing, if Persio had phoned the villa his call would be on the tape. And he couldn’t have driven there because either I or Pedro had been watching the villa.
I changed the subject. ‘How would you evaluate Conniston?’
‘I’d say he’s a thinker and not an action man. He’s tightened up the Company security here, I haven’t got a peep about what they’re doing. He was here back in late 1969 when the CIA organised the killing of Carlos Marighella and the destruction of his revolutionary group. Like I said, if Allenberg and his group are Americans I’m sure the local Station didn’t know they were here. But Conniston could have known.’
He paused, expecting me to supply a reason for the question.
‘Gary Stover said something really weird, it was just an aside. We were talking about what Gary called an “English connection”. Then for no reason he mentioned that Pat Conniston had dealt with these people before.’
‘These people?’
‘The auctioneers. Clearly Conniston doesn’t know their names but the Company must have bought something from them and presumably they produced the goods. Now what would the CIA want from a gunrunner like Martines? Not guns: information. Our friend Adolpho Martines is no small-time gunrunner who’s stumbled on to something big. Could it be that we are up against an efficient private intelligence service?’
I sounded melodramatic even to my own ears. Villa Nhambiquaras did not look like the hub of a global spy network. And it was plain from Martines’ voice that he was far too old and infirm to organise anything like that.
‘Let’s not exaggerate,’ Pedro said. ‘Martines sells guns, he can guess what they’re going to be used for. What could be more natural than making a little on the side by selling the information to Washington?’
I rose and walked to the window. There was a red Ford Corcel on the street below. Alarm bells rang until I noticed another red Corcel three cars away. It was, I reminded myself, a very popular model.
‘OK,’ I admitted, ‘it’s far-fetched but the auctioneers seem remarkably well informed. How did they get on to me in Chicago? Think about how they set this up. How did they get Richard Mendale’s name to send a message to him? How did they get the right name at the CIA? How did they contact the Russians and persuade them they had Griffin? Perhaps they’ve also had previous dealings with Moscow.’
We were going round in circles and my mind was only half on the questions I had just asked. Part of it was framing another question which I didn’t want to ask. If the auctioneers had been dealing with both the Russians and the Americans had they been dealing with anyone else. Had they been dealing with Six or even with us? Had Martines perhaps been selling DIS snippets of information over the years? And if so had it been via Pedro? When Pedro said nothing I changed the subject again. ‘What news do you have?’
‘By a circuitous but reliable route I’ve heard that Budermann has had at least two meetings with a member of a Syrian trade delegation here, a man named Khalid Attirmi. I’ve radioed London for information. It could be that we’re on to the way that Martines is arranging the contacts with the Russians. The Russians’ cover is Syrian. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as it sounds. Not only has Budermann been seeing Attirmi, he’s been doing so for some time: Attirmi has been in Brazil for nearly three weeks, long before Griffin was stolen.’
I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t make any kind of sense.’ I had said that before.
I thought I knew why my room had been bombed and what I was up against but Allenberg and now Attirmi simply didn’t fit in. As Pedro said, they had been in Brazil before anyone knew that Donnell was about to steal the Griffin Interrogator. There were only two possible explanations. One was that Allenberg and Attirmi had nothing to do with the Interrogator auction. The other was that Martines and Budermann had been in touch with Donnell long before the Interrogator was stolen and had developed plans for it which somehow involved Allenberg and Attirmi. If that was the case why had Donnell then apparently contacted the Russians?
‘Talking of Arabs, one of the supposed Arabs at the Hotel Florianopolis has been active. It seems our Russian friends are trying to find friends of their own. Abdel Rassem has been asking after Alvaro Banteretti, one of the old guard from the Partido Comunista Brasileiro. Unfortunately for him Banteretti’s now incarcerated on Flower Island, but Abdel Rassem had some other names. Looks like the Russians are trying to recruit local help.’
Pedro stood up. ‘Watkins is demanding to know why we’re not reporting fully so I’d better be off and send him something. And then I’ve got to go and meet a friend of yours. London are sending somebody else down, just in case Martines gets you next time.’
‘That’s cheerful. Do you know who it is?’
‘Julia French.’
I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t. She wasn’t at all the right person to send: she had virtually no operational experience and no Portuguese. But London trusted her, they opened up to her. By her own admission she had not been with the DIS for long and yet she behaved like a complete insider. I admitted to myself that in other circumstances I would be looking forward to seeing her again. But right now my feelings were more wary than warm.
One simple question had lodged in the back of my mind on my flight to Rio: what was I doing here? Why had I been chosen? There must have been hundreds far more qualified than me. The same question applied to Julia. What was she doing here?
British Intelligence has long been populated by gentleman amateurs and while neither Julia nor I could be considered gentlemen we were certainly amateurs. The men at the top of the DIS, however, were not. Although the DG, Watkins had once told me disdainfully, had spent the years immediately before joining the Defence Intelligence Staff ‘commanding a concrete battleship in Portsmouth Harbour’ both Adam Joseff and Richard Mendale had been with the Department for years. They knew what they were doing and Watkins himself was no fool. Why would they – to use an expression they would doubtless have used themselves – send boys to do a man’s job, or even worse send a boy and a girl?
Pedro had said they were sending her ‘down’ not ‘over’. So she had gone back to North America after the debriefing in London. What for? And where exactly had she gone? I remembered Gary saying she’d reached Chicago via Miami, not the usual route from Winnipeg.
It was no good putting any of these questions to Pedro. Even if he knew the answers I was sure he wouldn’t tell me. I stuck to practical matters.
‘We’ll need another handgun for Julia. And a rifle might not come amiss, and explosives.’
Pedro looked dubious. ‘We’re not the SAS old boy. Handguns I can manage, everyone needs that sort of protection in Brazil these days, but don’t get carried away. We’re not trying to start a war. I know someone who might sell me a rifle but I’m not about to announce that I’m in the market for explosives.’
He was right of course. I was getting carried away with myself. If he had suddenly produced a slab of Semtex I wouldn’t have known what to do with it.
‘I must run,’ Pedro continued. ‘If her plane’s on time Julia French will be waiting at the airport and that won’t help my popularity in London.’
‘OK, I’ll see you this afternoon. Then perhaps we can visit this Syrian friend of Budermann’s, Khalid Attirmi. Make sure French knows the Americans are on to her, she can’t stay at the Florianopolis.’
Pedro simply nodded. It occurred to me that he had spent his life in a world I still did not understand. He looked and sounded just as I imagined a DIS field man would look and sound but something grated. I looked at my watch. It was noon. Not much more than twelve hours from the explosion in my room and London had a replacement for me on the spot. That was quick, impossibly quick, even if they heard about the bomb the moment it exploded. Pedro must have a very efficient grapevine. And yet it was 11.30 before he’d bothered to come and check that I was alive and well. It wouldn’t take him that long to shake off a tail. He was clearly in no hurry to hear my account of last night’s events. He must have already known exactly what had happened and was sure I couldn’t add anything.
The real question was: had he known it was going to happen?